In the future, would it be wise to break the ibf_posts table down so it isn't so huge? How about one table per forum.

I can already think of the problems (searching, moving topics, etc.)

Thoughts?

that'd be hugely complicated to do but i guess not impossible (just a entire ipb rewrite :P). I think over the long of it, it would actually work out to be less efficient as your using more resources to gather data, especially for example the search engine it'd have to query possible up to dozens of tables.

Wouldn't work for our board as we've got two thirds in just one of the forums, and it's not really possible to break it up further.

We used SNITZ before, ASP solution, they had one table for archived posts and another for archived topics. Click on a symbol on the board index next to the forum name in order to access the archived posts in that forum. Options for regular archiving or you could just manually archive based on dates. On the advanced search there was an option to include the archive in the search. Perhaps introducing an archive would add too much complexity though.

Anyhow it should be the database engine's responsibility to do table partitioning at this level scaling.